The Wide Attentional Window: A Major Deficit of Children with Attention Difficulties

The present study assessed visual selective attention in children with attention difficulties compared to age-matched, typically achieving children. We used the flanker task, which requires participants to respond to a central target flanked by distractors, and the feature and conjunction visual search, which requires participants to search for a predesignated target embedded among a variable number of distractors. The results showed that children with attention difficulties encountered major problems only when responding to a central target flanked by adjacent incongruent distractors and when searching for a conjunctive target in a high-density display. These results suggest that children with attention difficulties have a characteristic inability to restrict visual attention to a limited spatial area so as to selectively process relevant information while effectively ignoring distracting information.